A Toast for J. P. Donleavy

Sebastian Dangerfield, the hero of J. P. Donleavy’s picaresque masterwork “The Ginger Man” (1955), knew how he wanted to exit this world. “When I die,” he says, “I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin.”

Donleavy was such a fond and riotous writer about drinking that, at word yesterday of his death at 91, more than a few readers felt like pouring one out for him.

“The Ginger Man” was his first and best book. It has sold more than 45 million copies, and sits on the Modern Library’s list of the best 100 novels of the 20th century. It clings to the penultimate rung, No. 99, between James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons.”

This perilous position suits Donleavy. He’s long been one of literature’s dangling men, a caustic satirist and not to everyone’s taste. At the start of his career, critics attempted to link him to both the Beats and Britain’s Angry Young Men of the 1950s.

In his spectral wit, Donleavy could resemble Samuel Beckett; in his delighted lustiness, Henry Miller; in his damp and scattered wordplay, James Joyce. An American who lived most of his life in Ireland, he spoke to the past century’s intellectual and moral dislocations. Like a greased pig, he eluded critical capture.

You can open to almost any page of “The Ginger Man” and catch the scent of an authentic literary voice. There are other scents to catch. The novel’s scoundrel-hero, an American student in Dublin on the G.I. Bill, and married too young, refuses to bathe because it “kills the personality.”

This stream-of-consciousness novel, which swings between first person and third, is an existential howl, a plea for more life in one’s life. “But Jesus,” Donleavy writes in it, “when you don’t have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it’s sex. When you have both, it’s health, you worry about getting ruptured or something. If everything’s simply jake then you’re frightened of death.”

Dorothy Parker reviewed the novel in Esquire. She called it “a rigadoon of rascality, a bawled-out comic song of sex.” Hunter S. Thompson likened it to “being dragged into a beer-brawl in some violent Irish pub.”

Thompson reviewed Donleavy’s second novel, “A Singular Man” (1963), in The National Observer. He admired one cruel, comic scene in particular, which reads like Nathanael West by way of “A Clockwork Orange.” A financial magus in Manhattan stipulates in his will that his possessions be sold.

The money should then, Donleavy wrote, “be converted to bank notes of small denomination and placed in a steel receptacle six feet high and one foot in diameter and so placed and so constructed as to withstand the rigors of a hoard.”

After the street is cleared, the public will be allowed to rush the container with fishing rods and croquet mallets. (“Citizens appearing out of the blue in skin diving equipment are to be looked upon askance.”) The ensuing mob scene is to be filmed for posterity.

Donleavy’s later books were markedly hit and miss. “The Ginger Man” aside, he wasn’t built for sustained performance. You took what his books gave you, which was often quite a lot.

Or not. Reviewing Donleavy’s 1971 novel “The Onion Eaters” in The New York Times, Anatole Broyard commented that it didn’t contain “a believable character, a meaningful incident, a good laugh, an interesting observation or an admirable sentence.”

Broyard also told his readers, however, that someone in it is accused of “lascivious grass skirt dancing.” That’s the kind of line which will cause some Donleavy admirers to scratch their chins, walk to the bookshelf and give the novel another look.

On the night before Donleavy’s death, I happened to be speaking with an old friend, a former rare-books dealer in New Orleans, who has a special place in his disreputable heart for Donleavy. This friend pushed on me Donleavy’s “The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners,” a nonfiction book issued in 1975.

I ordered a used copy online. It still hasn’t arrived. I did just come across this description of that book, in The Times, by John Leonard: “Donleavy instructs us on how, with style, to: pass into the upper classes, marry a lady for her money, bite the hand that feeds you, get rid of unwanted house guests, break wind, squeeze pimples, foul a footpath, lick one’s plate, pick one’s nose, masturbate, deal with the insane” and “blame somebody else for your venereal disease.”

Suddenly I want to go stand by the mailbox.

Donleavy lived long enough that, in his final decades, pilgrimages to visit him in rural Ireland became a literary subgenre. I’ll miss those articles. But the books are still here.